k
of the national culture, and sins against the one are sins against the
other. The American is school-mastered out of gusto, out of joy, out of
innocence. He can never fathom William Blake's notion that "the lust of
the goat is also to the glory of God." He must be correct, or, in his
own phrase, he must bust.

_Via trita est tutissima._ The new generation, urged to curiosity and
rebellion by its mounting sap, is rigorously restrained, regimented,
policed. The ideal is vacuity, guilelessness, imbecility. "We are
looking at this particular book," said Comstock's successor of "The
'Genius,'" "from the standpoint of its harmful effect on female readers
of immature mind."[81] To be curious is to be lewd; to know is to yield
to fornication. Here we have the mediaeval doctrine still on its legs: a
chance word may arouse "a libidinous passion" in the mind of a "modest"
woman. Not only youth must be safeguarded, but also the "female," the
untrustworthy one, the temptress. "Modest," is a euphemism; it takes
laws to keep her "pure." The "locks of chastity" rust in the Cluny
Museum; in place of them we have comstockery....

But, as I have said in hymning Huneker, there is yet the munyonic
consolation. Time is a great legalizer, even in the field of morals. We
have yet no delivery, but we have at least the beginnings of a revolt,
or, at all events, of a protest. We have already reached, in Howells,
our Hannah More; in Clemens, our Swift; in Henry James, our Horace
Walpole; in Woodberry, Robinson _et al._, our Cowpers, Southeys and
Crabbes; perhaps we might even make a composite and call it our Johnson.
We are sweating through our Eighteenth Century, our era of sentiment,
our spiritual measles. Maybe a new day is not quite so far off as it
seems to be, and with it we may get our Hardy, our Conrad, our
Swinburne, our Thomas, our Moore, our Meredith and our Synge.

THE END

FOOTNOTES:

[38] American Literature, tr. by Julia Franklin; New York, Doubleday,
Page & Co., 1915.

[39] New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1916.

[40] The first edition for public sale did not appear until June, 1917,
and in it the preface was suppressed.

[41] Second edition; Boston, Little, Brown & Co., 1859, xxvi.

[42] _Cf._ The Puritan, by Owen Hatteras, _The Smart Set_, July, 1916;
and The Puritan's Will to Power, by Randolph S. Bourne, _The Seven
Arts_, April, 1917.

[43] An instructive account of the organization and methods of the
Anti-Saloon Lea